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The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness

Specifically political action is possible because agents, who are part of the social world, have a (more or less adequate) knowledge of this world and because one can act on the social world by acting on their knowledge of this world. This action aims to produce and impose representations (mental, verbal, visual or theatrical) of the social world which may be capable of acting on this world by acting on agents’ representation of it. Or, more precisely, it aims to make or unmake groups - and. by the same token, the collective actions they can undertake to transform the social world in accordance with their interests - by producing, reproducing or destroying the representations that make groups visible for themselves and for others.

As an object of knowledge for the agents who inhabit it. the economic and social world exerts a force upon them not in the form of a mechanical determination, but in the form of a knowledge effect. It is clear that, at least in the case of dominated individuals, this effect does not tend to favour political action. We know that the social order owes some measure of its permanence to the fact that it imposes schemes of classification which, being adjusted to objective classifications, produce a form of recognition of this order, the kind implied by the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of its foundations: the correspondence between objective divisions and classificatory schemes, between objective structures and mental structures, underlies a kind of original adherence to the established order. Politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines the original doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive

subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world.

But the heretical break with the established order, and with the dispositions and representations engendered by it among the agents moulded according to its structures, itself presupposes a conjuncture of critical discourse and an objective crisis, capable of disrupting the close correspondence between the incorporated structures and the objective structures which produce them, and of instituting a kind of practical epochs, a suspension of the initial adherence to the established order.

Heretical subversion exploits the possibility of changing the social world by changing the representation of this world which contributes to its reality or, more precisely, by counterposing a paradoxical pre-vision, a utopia, a project or programme, to the ordinary vision which apprehends the social world as a natural world: the performative utterance, the political pre-vision, is in itself a pre-diction which aims to bring about what it utters. It contributes practically to the reality of what it announces by the fact of uttering it, of pre-dicting it and making it pre-dicted, of making it conceivable and above all credible and thus creating the collective representation and will which contribute to its production. Every theory, as the word itself suggests, is a programme of perception, but this is all the more true of theories about the social world. And there are, no doubt, relatively few cases in which the structuring power of words, their capacity to prescribe while seeming to describe and to denounce while seeming to enunciate, is so clear. Many ‘intellectual debates’ are less unrealistic than they seem if one is aware of the degree to which one can modify social reality by modifying the agents’ representation of it. One can see the extent to which the social reality of something like alcoholism (and one could say the same of abortion, drug abuse or euthanasia) changes according to whether it is perceived and thought of as a hereditary weakness, a moral failure, a cultural tradition or a way of compensating for something. A word like paternalism wreaks havoc by throwing suspicion on everything which, by a permanent denial of self-interest, transforms the relation of domination into an enchanted relation. Like hierarchical relations organized according to the model of enchanted relations, of which the domestic group is the site par excellence, all forms of symbolic capital - prestige, charisma, charm - and the relations of exchange through which this capital accumulates - the exchange of services, gifts, attention, care, affection - are particularly vulnerable to the destructive effect of words which expose and disenchant. But the constitutive power of (religious or political)

language, and of the schemes of perception and thought which it procures, is never clearer than in situations ofcrisis: these paradoxical and extra-ordinary situations call for an extra-ordinary kind of discourse, capable of raising the practical principles of an ethos to the level of explicit principles which generate (quasi-) systematic responses, and of expressing all the unheard-of and ineffable characteristics of the situation created by the crisis.

Heretical discourse must not only help to sever the adherence to the world of common sense by publicly proclaiming a break with the ordinary order, it must also produce a new common sense and integrate within it the previously tacit or repressed practices and experiences of an entire group, investing them with the legitimacy conferred by public expression and collective recognition. Indeed, since every language that makes itself heard by an entire group is an authorized language, invested with the authority of this group, it authorizes what it designates at the same time as it expresses it, drawing its legitimacy from the group over which it exercises its authority and which it helps to produce as such by offering it a unitary expression of its experiences. The efficacy of heretical discourse does not reside in the magic of a force immanent to language, such as Austin’s ‘illocutionary force’, or in the person of its author, such as Weber’s ‘charisma' (two screen-like concepts which prevent one from examining the reasons for the effects which they merely designate), but rather in the dialectic between the authorizing and authorized language and the dispositions of the group which authorizes it and authorizes itself to use it. This dialectical process is accomplished, in the case of each of the agents concerned and. most of all, in the case of the person producing the heretical discourse, in and through the labour of enunciation which is necessary in order to externalize the inwardness, to name the unnamed and to give the beginnings of objectification to pre-verbal and pre-reflexive dispositions and ineffable and unobservable experiences, through words which by their nature make them common and communicable, therefore meaningful and socially sanctioned. It may also be accomplished in the labour of dramatization, particularly visible in exemplary prophecy, which alone is capable of destroying the self-evident truths of the doxa, and in the transgression which is indispensable in order to name the unnameabie, to break the censorships, institutionalized or internalized, which prohibit the return of the repressed; and first of all in the heresiarch himself.

But it is in the constitution of groups that the effectiveness of representations is most apparent, and particularly in the words,

slogans and theories which help to create the social order by imposing principles of di-vision and, more generally, the symbolic power of the whole political theatre which actualizes and officializes visions of the world and political divisions. The political labour of representation (not only in words or theories but also in demonstrations, ceremonies or any other form of symbolization of divisions or oppositions) gives the objectivity of public discourse and exemplary practice to a way of seeing or of experiencing the social world that was previously relegated to the state of a practical disposition of a tacit and often confused experience (unease, rebelliousness, etc.), ft thus enables agents to discover within themselves common properties that lie beyond the diversity of particular situations which isolate, divide and demobilize, and to construct their social identity on the basis of characteristics or experiences that seemed totally dissimilar so long as the principle of pertinence by virtue of which they could be constituted as indices of membership of the same class was lacking.

The transition from the state of being a practical group to the state of being an instituted group (class, nation, etc.) presupposes the construction of the principle of classification capable of producing the set of distinctive properties which characterize the set of members in this group, and capable also of annulling the set of non-pertinent properties which part or all of its members possess in other contexts (e.g. properties of nationality, age or sex), and which might serve as a basis for other constructions. The struggle lies therefore at the very root of the construction of the class (social, ethnic, sexual, etc.): every group is the site of a struggle to impose a legitimate principle of group construction, and every distribution of properties, whether it concerns sex or age, education or wealth, may serve as a basis for specifically political divisions or struggles. The construction of dominated groups on the basis of such and such specific difference is inseparable from the deconstruction of groups established on the basis of generic properties or qualities (men, the old, the French, Parisians, citizens, patriots, etc.) which, in another state of symbolic relations of power, defined the social identity, and sometimes even the legal identity, of the agents concerned. Indeed, any attempt to institute a new division must reckon with the resistance of those who, occupying a dominant position in the space thus divided, have an interest in perpetuating a doxic relation to the social world which leads to the acceptance of established divisions as natural or to their symbolic denial through the affirmation of a higher unity (national, familial, etc).¹ Jn other words, dominant individuals favour the

consensus, a fundamental agreement concerning the meaning or sense of the social world (thus converted into the doxic, natural world) which is based on agreement concerning the principles of di-vision.

The propulsive force of heretical criticism is met by the resistant force of orthodoxy. Dominated individuals make common cause with discourse and consciousness, indeed with science, since they cannot constitute themselves as a separate group, mobilize themselves or mobilize their potential power unless they question the categories of perception of the social order which, being the product of that order, inclined them to recognize that order and thus submit to it.

Dominated individuals are less likely to bring about a symbolic revolution - which is the condition for the reappropriation of the social identity of which their acceptance of dominant taxonomies has deprived them (even subjectively) - when the subversive force and criticai competence accumulated in the course of previous struggles is relatively slight, and consequently when the consciousness of the positive or, more likely, negative properties which define them is relatively weak. Thus dispossessed of the economic and cultural conditions necessary for their awareness of the fact that they are dispossessed and enclosed within the limits of the knowledge authorized by their instruments of knowledge, the utterances and the actions that sub-proletarians and proletarianized peasants produce, in order to subvert the social order of which they are the victims, are organized according to the principles of logical division which are at the very root of this order (cf. wars of religion).

In contrast to this, dominant individuals, in the absence of being able to restore the silence of the doxa, strive to produce, through a purely reactionary discourse, a substitute for everything that is threatened by the very existence of heretical discourse. Finding nothing for which to reproach the social world as it stands, they endeavour to impose universally, through a discourse permeated by the simplicity and transparency of common sense, the feeling of obviousness and necessity which this world imposes on them; having an interest in leaving things as they are, they attempt to undermine politics in a depoliticized political discourse, produced through a process of neutralization or, even better, of negation, which seeks to restore the doxa to its original state of innocence and which, being oriented towards the naturalization of the social order, always borrows the language of nature.

This politically unmarked political language is characterized by a rhetoric of impartiality, marked by the effects of symmetry, balance, the golden mean, and sustained by an ethos of propriety and decency, exemplified by the avoidance of the most violent polemical forms, by discretion, an avowed respect for adversaries, in short, everything which expresses the negation of political struggle as struggle. This strategy of (ethical) neutrality is naturally accomplished in the rhetoric of scientificity.

This nostalgic yearning for the protodoxa is expressed with utter naivety in the admiration that all conservatisms display for ‘decent people' (most often personified by the peasant), whose essential property is designated clearly by the euphemisms (‘simple folk’, ‘working people’) which feature in orthodox discourse: their submission to the established order, In fact, the struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy that occurs in the political field conceals the opposition between the set of political propositions taken as a whole (whether orthodox or heterodox), that is. the sphere of what is politically utterable in the political field, on the one hand, and, on the other, everything that remains beyond discussion (in the field), that is, beyond the reach of discourse and which, relegated to the state of doxa, is accepted tacitly without discussion or examination by the very people who confront one another at the level of declared political choices.

The struggle in which knowledge of the social world is at stake would be pointless if each agent could find, within himself, the source of an infallible knowledge of the truth of his condition and his position in the social space, and it would be equally pointless if the same agents could not recognize themselves in different discourses and classifications (according to class, ethnicity, religion, sex, etc.), or in opposing evaluations of the products resulting from the same principles of classification. But the effects of this struggle would be totally unpredictable if there were no limit to allodoxia, to errors in perception and above all in expression, and if the propensity to recognize oneself in the different discourses and classifications offered were equally probable among all agents, whatever their position in the social space (and hence their dispositions), and whatever the structure of that space, the form of the distributions and the nature of the divisions according to which it is actually organized.

The pre-vision or theory effect (understood as the effect of imposition of the principles of di-vision which occurs whenever an attempt is made to make something explicit) operates in the margin

of uncertainty resulting from the discontinuity between the silent and self-evident truths of the ethos and the public expressions of the logos: thanks to the allodoxia made possible by the distance between the order of practice and the order of discourse, the same dispositions may be recognized in very different, sometimes opposing stances. This means that science is destined to exert a theory effect, but one which takes a very particular form: by expressing in a coherent and empirically valid discourse what was previously ignored, i.e, what was (according to the case in question) implicit or repressed, it transforms the representation of the social world as well as simultaneously transforming the social world itself, at least to the extent that it renders possible practices that conform to this transformed representation. Thus, if it is true that one can trace (virtually as far back in history as one wishes) the first manifestations of class struggle, and even the first more or less elaborated expressions of a ‘theory’ of class struggle (by speaking of 'precursors’), the fact remains that it is only after Marx, and indeed only after the creation of parties capable of imposing (on a large scale) a vision of the social world organized according to the theory of class struggle, that one could refer, strictly speaking, to classes and class struggle. Those who, in the name of Marxism, search for classes and class struggle in pre-capitalist (and pre-Marxist) societies are committing a theoretical error which is altogether typical of the combination of scientistic realism and economism which always inclined the Marxist tradition to look for classes in the very reality of the social world, often reduced to its economic dimension:² paradoxically. Marxist theory, which has exercised a theory effect unrivalled in history, devotes no space to the theory effect in its theory of history and of class.

Reality and will: class (or the class struggle) is reality to the extent that it is will and will to the extent that it is reality. Political practices and political representations (and in particular the representations of the division into classes), of the kind that can be observed and measured at a given moment in time in a society which has had a long exposure to the theory of class struggle, are partly the product of the theory effect - it being understood that this effect has owed a measure of its symbolic effectiveness to the fact that the theory of class struggle was objectively rooted in objective and incorporated properties, and as a consequence encountered the complicity of political dispositions. The categories according to which a group envisages itself, and according to which it represents itself and its specific reality, contribute to the reality of this group. This implies that the whole history of the working-class movement and of the

theories through which it has constructed social reality is present in the reality of this movement considered at a particular moment in time. It is in the struggles which shape the history of the social world that the categories of perception of the social world, and the groups produced according to these categories, are simultaneously constructed.³

Even the most strictly constative scientific description is always open to the possibility of functioning in a prescriptive way, capable of contributing to its own verification by exercising a theory effect through which it helps to bring about that which it declares. Like the phrase, ‘the meeting is open¹, the thesis, ‘there are two classes’, may be understood as a constative utterance or a performative utterance. This is what creates the intrinsic indeterminacy of all political theses which, like the affirmation or negation of the existence of classes, regions or nations, take a clear stand on the reality of different representations of reality, or on their ability to make reality. The science which may be tempted to cut through these debates by-providing an objective measure of the degree of realism of the respective positions must, if it is to proceed in a logical way, describe the space in which these struggles take place and where what is at stake, among other things, is the representation of the forces engaged in the struggle and their chances of success - and it must do so without ignoring the fact that any ‘objective’ evaluation of those aspects of reality which are at stake in the struggles in reality is likely to exert effects that are entirely real. How can one fail to see that a prediction may have a role not only in its author's intentions, but also in the reality of its social realization, either as a self-fulfilling prophecy, a performative representation capable of exerting a specifically political effect of consecrating the established order (and all the more so the more recognized it is), or as an exorcism, capable of eliciting the actions likely to refute it? As Gunnar Myrdal has clearly demonstrated, the key words in the vocabulary of economics, not only terms like ‘principle’, ‘equilibrium’, ‘productivity’, 'adjust* ment’, ‘function’, etc., but also more central and unavoidable concepts like ‘utility’, ‘value’, ‘real* or ‘subjective¹ costs, etc., not to mention notions like ‘economic¹, ‘natural’, ‘equitable’ (to which one should add ‘rational’), are always simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive.⁴

The most neutral science exerts effects which are anything but neutral. Thus, simply by establishing and publishing the value assumed by the probability function of an event, i.e., as Popper suggests, the force of the propensity of this event to occur, an

objective property inherent in the nature of things, one may help to reinforce this event’s “claim to exist’, as Leibniz used to say, by determining agents to prepare for it and to submit to it, or, conversely, by inciting them to mobilize in an effort to prevent it by using their knowledge of its probability in order to make its occurrence more difficult, if not impossible. Equally, it is not enough to replace the academic opposition between two ways of conceiving social differentiation, as a set of hierarchical strata or as a set of antagonistic strata, with the question - which is of capital importance for any revolutionary strategy - of whether, al the moment in question, the dominated classes constitute an antagonistic power capable of defining its own objectives, in short, a mobilized class, or, on the contrary, a stratum situated at the lowest point in a hierarchized space and defined by its distance from the dominant values; or, in other words, whether the struggle between the classes is a revolutionary struggle, aimed at overturning the established order, or a competitive struggle, a kind of race in which the dominated endeavour to appropriate the properties of the dominant. Nothing would be more open to refutation by reality, and therefore less scientific, than an answer to this question which, considering exclusively the practices and dispositions of the agents at the moment in question, failed to take into account the existence or non-existence of agents or organizations capable of working to confirm or invalidate one vision or the other, on the basis of more or less realistic pre-visions or predictions of the objective prospects for one possibility or the other, predictions and prospects that are themselves liable to be affected by scientific knowledge of reality.

AU the indications are that the theory effect, which may be exerted, in reality itself, by agents and organizations capable of imposing a principle of division or, if you like, of producing or reinforcing symbolically the systematic propensity to favour certain aspects of reality and ignore others, is all the more powerful and above all durable when the processes of objectification and of rendering things explicit are rooted in reality, and hence the divisions in thought correspond more precisely to real divisions. In other words, the potential force which is mobilized by symbolic constitution is all the more important when the classificatory prop-erties through which a group is explicitly characterized, and in which it recognizes itself, encompass more completely the properties with which the agents constitutive of the group are objectively endowed (and which define their position in the distribution of the instruments of appropriation of the accumulated social product).

The science of the social mechanisms which, like the mechanisms of cultural heredity linked to the functioning of the educational system, or the mechanisms of symbolic domination linked to the unification of the market in economic and cultural goods, tend to ensure the reproduction of the established order can be put to the service of an opportunistic, laisser-faire approach committed to rationalizing (in both senses) the way these mechanisms function. But this science may just as easily serve as a foundation for a politics oriented towards completely different ends which, breaking just as much with the voluntarism of ignorance or despair as with the laisser-faire approach, would arm itself with the knowledge of these mechanisms in order to try and neutralize them; and which would find, in the knowledge of the probable, not an incitement to fatalistic resignation or irresponsible utopianism, but the foundation for a rejection of the probable based on the scientific mastery of the laws of production governing the eventuality rejected.